Donald Trump bottoms out
Joe Biden probably got in the most memorable line of the debate when he said what we’ve all been thinking for the last five years with: “Will you shut up, man?” One of his strongest criticisms of the Trump administration, however, got lost in the numerous soundbites of Tuesday night – when Biden pointed out that Trump’s economy was never really that great and the actual recession didn’t just happen due to COVID – that it had already hit before the pandemic forced the nation’s economy to shut down.
The manufacturing sector, which Donald Trump tried to appease in 2016 by reassuring factory workers their jobs wouldn’t go overseas, spent most of last year in a mild recession. Even worse, the National Bureau of Economic Research, the body that officially determines when the country goes into recession, ruled that the U.S. economy went into recession in February, with a significant decline in economic activity after the last quarter of 2019. That’s over a month before the COVID pandemic forced the country to shut down, with 14.7% unemployment – the worst that it’s been since the end of World War II. That means Donald Trump inherited the most prosperous growth period in recent American history and ended up with the worst economic fallout when it ended, no matter how he tries to spin this.
Although he tried to criticize Joe Biden for the slow recovery during the Obama administration (completely ignoring that part of it was due to a predominantly Republican congress obstructing much of the way), the blame lies in Trump’s 2017 tax cuts that were supposed to pay for themselves and did nothing for job growth, only managing to further strangle Obama’s record-setting recovery. Trump and the GOP that was contemplating this tax cut well before Trump was even elected, own this and this is why we must vote them all out by November 3.
